BetterRed wrote the following as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
But the Romans had a written language, it's one of the foundations of the one I'm using now. Yet they failed to write down how they made concrete. It's only be rediscovered in the past couple of decades; the secrete [sic] ingredient -- 'fly ash', which they sourced from Mt Vesuvius. Which we could source from coal-fired power stations - oops 
BR |
A factor in this is how literate were people in the past. One of the factors that worked against the two early writing systems of cuneiform and hieroglyphics was that they were difficult to learn and thus it limited literacy to only the Elite. From what I understand, one of the reasons that The Rosetta Stone was such an important discovery was that it allowed us to translate hieroglyphics so that we could get an idea of what they said.
One of the factors in the success of the Alphabet is that it was easy to learn, and thus allowed widespread literacy. This, in turn, will allow knowledge to be better retained for future generations, although changes in the language my cause issues in the future.